Laura Mullen's triptych "Bride of the Photograph 1839-1930", "Bride of The Bayou", & "Bride of the Photograph 1940-1944" are portraits, but along with giving us a visual and sensual impression of her subject matter, Mullen invites us to engage questions of objectivity and aesthetic worth. A line like this in the first of this triptych gets to the nature of an object's representation as image, before such a rendering takes place: "No one knows how to be recorded yet, no one knows how to act: for their transformation into image they are as earnest as painted supplicants at heavens gate." This is a fundamental and timeless question of artistic form and value: In what way do we create a facsimile of reality, impressionistic, conceptual, or otherwise, in order to give us a more valuable understanding of the world?